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Kansas Police And Black Lives Matter Hold Cookout Event

An interaction between Kansas police and a Black Lives Matter protest ended in a somewhat surprising way.

According to KWCH, nearly 1,000 people attended 'The First Steps Cookout' at McAdams Park in Wichita, Kansas, with Wichita police officers. Protestors had originally planned to march, but after organizers met with Police Chief Gordon Ramsay, they agreed to hold a barbecue together, instead.

Kansas.com reports that the idea was to open up lines of communication and build trust, from the perspective of the police, and for the protesters. While the previous week's march was largely attended by African American youth, the crowd at the barbecue drew whites, blacks, and Hispanics in large numbers, and included a number of older people and children.

At one table, three men -- a black man, a Hispanic man, and a white man -- sat down with burgers next to Lt. Travis Rakestraw to share their ideas. It was the first time since 1992 that Jarvis Scott, the black man, said he’d sat down with a police officer, and the other two said it was their first time ever sitting down with an officer.

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Capt. Rusty Leeds said that community policing used to be a bigger part of the department, as a response to gang violence in the 1990s. “Then it was the gang violence, and now it’s the conduct of police,” said Leeds, about why the police had to get back out in the community again.

Leeds said that budget issues were part of the reason the police had moved away from these kinds of events.

Rakestraw listened to Ivan Ray, a Hispanic student at the University of Kansas who had recently taken a class about racial disparities. He was impressed with how Ray framed the issue of police violence in terms of many other social issues, including poverty and education.

“The community needs more people like you who can see the problems [through] wide open eyes,” Rakestraw told Ray. “What should we do about it?”

The three men said they were surprised to hear that Rakestraw seemed to care about what they were saying, and that he had thought about the same issues.

Rakestraw, for his part, said that from the police perspective, a conversation like the one they were having at the barbecue felt more productive than many of the protests he’s seen across the nation, which are based on confrontation rather than dialog.

“I don’t think it’s a conscious effort,” Rakestraw told them, about why racial biases sometimes persist. “I don’t think anybody does it intentionally but we fill in the gaps with life experiences, what we read in the paper, and we start to view people as a generalization instead of understanding people as individuals.”

The three men nodded.

These smaller conversations, between community members and police, turned into a public forum at around 7 p.m. when hundreds gathered around a microphone to ask questions of Police Chief Gordon Ramsay.

The community did not hold back. One of the first questions was whether the black community was being bought off with food. How would a barbecue help with racial profiling?

Another woman told Ramsay about an experience with police where she said she’d been physically mistreated. Ramsay told the crowd that every officer will have a body camera and they will be able to look at that footage with him when they make complaints about officers.

“If you feel mistreated, I want to know about it,” Ramsay said. “If they feel they are being mistreated, at the scene is not the time to argue about it, wait until it’s over.”

“Loud and clear I have zero tolerance for racial profiling or racial bias,” Ramsay added.

Many praised Ramsay for holding the event, and several audience members said that in all their years in Wichita, they couldn’t remember a police chief coming out in the community like this.